First Impressions: The Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection

I usually save all of my comments about a DVD I’m reviewing until I get to the official review. With over 50 hours of content to wade through, I hope you’ll forgive me some preliminary remarks about what shows the potential to be one of the best DVD releases this year.

I’m talking about The Real Ghostbusters: The Complete Series, which has been released by Time Life as an online exclusive, which is part of why I wanted to make sure I mentioned in advance my first impressions on this release. See, to give this box set my full attention will take quite a bit of time, but if you’ve got a Real Ghostbusters fan in your household that might want this for whatever upcoming holiday you celebrate, you can’t just walk into the store to get this, so you need to know right now how cool this set is.

My first impression of the set comes almost completely from the packaging. The box for the set is a nicely designed box that looks like the Ghostbusters headquarters building, with a lenticular version of the Ghostbusters logo ghost attempting to saw out of the logo on the cover, and a lenticular Slimer on the side. I was surprised at the weight of the box though. Sure, the set is made up of 25 discs, but I’ve felt that amount of discs in a much lighter box before. When I opened the box I saw why the set was so weighty - each of the five volumes of the set are contained in steel-book containers! Each of the containers have a nice image of the characters on the front, and an image on the back of the Ghostbusters logo being sucked into a trap, with the logo disappearing more into the trap with each volume.

Accompanying the five steel-book cases is a disc of bonus material and a nice booklet that introduces the set with a brief history of the show and then lists the contents of each disc and volume. Again, this is a very nice presentation of the material. Thumbing through the book, it looks like every disc has several special features included, whether it be visual commentary tracks (where the episode plays in the corner of the screen while four people involved with making the show talk about the episode) or special introductions from key people.

Right now I’ve only made my way through a handful of the episodes and a little bit of the bonus material, but this really looks like a set that was assembled for true fans of the show. The people involved in making the show over 20 years ago still care about the work they did and realize the fans care about the work they did too, and this set shows that quickly. I look forward to seeing more of what’s here and reporting back with an official review soon.

Remember, The Real Ghostbusters: The Complete Collection is only available online at Time Life.com.